You’re in a different language, putting it in a different context and the frame is visible.” So you’re not comparing it with the real thing, apples to apples. “I always felt like if I’m going to recreate this in a fiction form, I better do something different with it. “When I was doing research on the Bowie of `Velvet Goldmine’ or all the Dylans of `I’m Not Here,’ you come across the real thing,” says Haynes. In “I’m Not There,” rather than attempt the impossible task of finding an actor for Bob Dylan, he cast seven. His “Velvet Goldmine” was a glam-rock fantasia of David Bowie.
Previously, he’s turned to deliberately artificial fictions of great musicians. “The Velvet Underground” is Haynes’ first documentary. “You really felt that coexistence and the creative inspiration that was being swapped from medium to medium,” says Haynes, who notes such localized hotbeds now seem extinct, a victim of a digital world. The documentary, more than anything, is a revelatory portrait of artistic crosspollination. Haynes patiently traces the fertile downtown landscape of Warhol’s Factory, the explosion of queer New York and how Lou Reed and the Velvets were turned on by acts like the Ramones or the experimental drone music of La Monte Young. “The Velvet Underground” is most singular in how it resurrects the 1960s downtown New York art scene that birthed and fermented the group.
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15, plums little-seen footage and features a host of rare interviews, including founding member John Cale (who describes the band as striving for “how to be elegant and how to be brutal”), Jonathan Richman of the Modern Lovers and an early disciple, and Jonas Mekas, the late pioneering filmmaker who filmed the Velvet Underground’s first ever live performance in 1964 and to whom the film is dedicated. “The Velvet Underground,” which Apple will release in theatres and on its streaming platform Oct. Let’s get right to how this happened, this music, where these people came from and how this miracle of this group of people came together.” “There were a lot of things I was going to be like: OK, we know this.
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R (language, sexual content, nudity, some drug material).“I didn’t need to make a movie to tell you how great the band is,” Haynes said in an interview. At Kendall Square, West Newton, and streaming on Apple TV+. Without the snarl, the songs wouldn’t be a pleasure to listen to - even if pleasure isn’t necessarily quite the right word.ĭirected by Todd Haynes. His voice is as distinctive as Cale’s, though with a snarliness that isn’t a comparable pleasure to listen to. Almost 35 years after his death, what doesn’t he haunt in this culture? More directly, so does Reed, who’s often heard in archival audio interviews. It wasn’t just in songs like “Heroin” or “White Light/White Heat.” No wonder that Cher - yes, that Cher - said of the band at its height, “It will replace nothing except suicide.” Get real.” There you have, still, the sense of menace in the band’s attitude. “This love, peace crap,” she says, “we hated that. The most important interviewees are the two surviving original band members: Cale, whose Welsh intonations are a pleasure to listen to, and Tucker, whose granny fierceness in front of the camera now is a match for her gamine fierceness behind a drum kit then. Still in his teens, he opened for them once and claims to have heard them in concert “60-70 times,” often at the Boston Tea Party.įrom left: John Cale, Spencer Morrison, Lou Reed. The singer-songwriter Jonathan Richman, of Modern Lovers fame, speaks fervently of the band. There’s a comparable high-octane quality to the documentary.Īlong with the archival footage, there are talking-head interviews with the likes of Warhol “superstar” Mary Woronov Reed’s sister (who does a nifty version of The Ostrich, a dance inspired by a small hit from the Primitives, a Velvets’ forerunner) and the classical composer La Monte Young. The Factory was amphetamine central, and Reed’s heavy indulgence would help break up the band. It allows Haynes to cram in that much more information into each shot and the image onrush that results makes for a very energetic film. It also means that seeing the documentary in a theater would make the viewing experience even more preferable to streaming than usual. Much of the film is presented in split screen, which means multiple images are presented simultaneously. Split screen images from "The Velvet Underground." Apple TV+
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